Our Centre of Excellence in Digestive Health supports research, training, multidisciplinary collaboration and translation of findings for the understanding, identification and management of chronic digestive diseases.
Why Study Digestive Diseases?
Digestive diseases are common, especially unexplained (functional) gastrointestinal disorders which affect one third of Australians. People with some digestive diseases can have reoccurring, relapsing and debilitating symptoms that last for many years. Digestive diseases can have a negative impact on the quality of life of patients and their families and represent an enormous burden to the health care system. At present treatments for some of these digestive diseases are generally not effective for a lot of patients. There is an urgent need to better understand these diseases, improve disease diagnosis and management and inform the use of new therapies.
Our Centre is funded by the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centres of Research Excellence program, from 2020-2024. It brings together researchers from universities, hospitals and research institutions in Newcastle, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide. World leading researchers, clinicians and healthcare providers are joining with stakeholders, patients and carers to improve the understanding, diagnosis and management of chronic digestive diseases.
Our Centre of Research Excellence in Digestive Health will:
Develop targeted treatments for patients
Innovate the reclassification of specific digestive diseases for better screening and diagnosis
Generate a bio-bank of patient clinical data, blood and tissue samples to drive future research
Enhance the understanding of digestive diseases using innovative research techniques
Simplify diagnosis and treatment of chronic digestive diseases
Translate research outcomes into primary, secondary and tertiary clinical practice
Inform patients and clinicians on the latest evidence based treatments
Venture into new technologies to better research, assess and treat patients
Engage with patients to better understand their symptoms